Bombs Away Read online

  Another neighbor said, “This just turned into the exact middle of nowhere.”

  Plenty of people already thought Fakenham was nowhere. They moved to Norwich or to London to have a better chance of making something of themselves. The ones who’d gone to Norwich made…part of that glowing, swelling cloud. Daisy burst into tears.

  “COME ON, you sorry turds! Get moving!” Sergeant Gergely shouted, sounding like any sergeant in the history of the world from the time of Julius Caesar.

  Tibor Nagy shrugged without seeming to, trying to make the straps of his pack dig into his shoulders less. It was a losing effort. He’d known ahead of time it would be. He had an easy twenty-five kilos of stuff in there. Of course the straps would dig in.

  Along with the rest of the men in his squad, he tramped out to the truck waiting in front of the barracks. Sergeant Gergely kept right on cussing as they climbed in one after another. He was in his thirties, almost twice the age of most of the kids he led. He’d fought for Admiral Horthy in the big war and for the Arrow Cross after the Nazis found out Horthy was trying to escape from the conflict. He’d fought against the Russians in Russia, and he’d defended Budapest against them after the tide turned.

  And now here he was, a sergeant in the Hungarian People’s Army. He wore a Russian-style helmet instead of the German coal-scuttle model that had kept fragments away from his brain in the last dance. He carried a Russian submachine gun. Well, he might have done that from 1941 to 1945, too. Plenty of Hungarian—and German—soldiers had. The PPD and PPSh weren’t pretty, but they were reliable, and they put a lot of lead in the air.

  How had Gergely escaped a reeducation camp? The only thing Tibor could think of was that the Russians realized they needed some noncoms who knew what they were doing. It wasn’t as if they had men of their own who spoke Magyar. No doubt both the MGB and the Hungarian secret police were keeping an eye on the sergeant. They hadn’t landed on him yet, though.

  “A horse’s cock up your ass, Szolovits!” the sergeant barked as he got into the truck. “Shove forward! Gimme some room!” He ragged on Szolovits because the tall, skinny soldier was a Jew. He ragged on the other guys because they were soldiers.

  Groaning and farting, the truck chugged away from the barracks. It was a beat-up American Studebaker, no doubt sent to the USSR during the big war and used hard from that moment on. The Russians made their own trucks now. Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria and Romania got their hand-me-downs.

  Tibor’s rifle was a hand-me-down. The varnish on the Mosin-Nagant’s chipped, cracked birch stock couldn’t hide the bloodstain under it. At least one fellow who’d used the piece hadn’t been lucky. But the action worked smoothly. One of the things Sergeant Gergely was good for was making sure his minions kept their weapons clean and knew how to use them. If Tibor started shooting—no, when he started—he had a fair chance of hitting what he aimed at.

  I don’t know why the hell I bother. Gergely’s rifle-range snarl dinned in his memory. If you can’t see that taking care of your rifle will help keep you breathing, odds are you’re too fucking dumb to deserve to live.

  They rolled on through Pest, then crossed a battered bridge over the Danube into Buda. The two halves were and weren’t part of the same city. People from Budapest sneered at all other Magyars as country bumpkins, hardly better than Slovaks. People from Buda felt the same way about their neighbors from Pest. Men from Pest were ready to punch the faggots from Buda in the nose if they said anything like that too loudly.

  One of the things that united the two sides of the Danube was the Russian siege they’d gone through at the end of the war. Everyone had endured the suffering of the damned then. The Red Army cleared the Nazis and the Arrow Cross soldiers block by block, house by house, sometimes room by room. The Germans and Magyars gave up at last because they couldn’t fight any more. Even after Budapest fell, the Germans mounted two ferocious counterattacks to try to get it back. No wonder both parts of the city were still full of shell-bitten, bullet-pocked ruins.

  “Listen to me, you sorry shitheads, so you know what’s going on,” Sergeant Gergely rasped now. “The Americans dropped atomic bombs on China. To pay them back, the Soviet Union dropped some on France and England and Germany. They’ve got their whole army moving west now, so naturally we’re going to help out our fraternal socialist allies. Right?”

  “Right, Sergeant!” Tibor chorused, along with everybody else in the squad. Telling your sergeant he was wrong might not be suicidal, but you weren’t likely to be happy after you did it.

  Not for the first time, Tibor wondered how Sergeant Gergely came out so naturally with phrases like fraternal socialist allies. Had he mouthed Fascist slogans the same way when he wore that other helmet?

  It wasn’t something a private could come out and ask him. The Hungarian People’s Army did its best to pretend its predecessors hadn’t fought side by side with Hitler and the Nazis. Its best wasn’t perfect, or people like Sergeant Gergely would be dead now. But the amnesia ran pretty deep.

  “Sergeant?” That was Szolovits.

  “What do you want?” Gergely glowered at him.

  “What do we do if the Americans drop an atom bomb on us?”

  “What the hell do you think we do? We fucking die, that’s what. Anybody else got a stupid question?” Gergely said.

  The guy next to Gyula nudged him. Gyula Pusztai was as tall as Isztvan Szolovits, and at least twice as wide through the shoulders. He was strong as a bull. Unfortunately, he was also about as smart as a bull. “Did the sergeant say we were going off to fight the Americans?” he whispered.

  “That’s about the size of it,” Tibor whispered back. Sergeant Gergely gave them both a fishy stare. Most of the time, you’d catch hell for any unauthorized talk. But they were heading off to war. Chances were the whole Hungarian People’s Army was heading off to war, with its rickety trucks and secondhand rifles and men who were still figuring out how to be good Communists.

  Gyula might not have been the brightest candle in the chandelier, but he knew what he thought about that. “Christ have mercy!” he yipped, something no good Communist was supposed to say. “They’ll slaughter us!” He was too horrified to remember to keep whispering.

  Tibor waited for Sergeant Gergely to tear Gyula to pieces, either with his barbed tongue or with his knobby, hairy-backed hands. But the sergeant’s face…mellowed? Tibor wouldn’t have believed his eyes—didn’t dare believe them—till Gergely said, “Don’t worry about it more than you can help, sonny. I said the same thing when we got on a train to go fight the Russians. I was wet behind the ears then. You go into combat, you grow up in a hurry. And I’m still here, you’ll notice.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.” By the way Gyula Pusztai said it, he also wondered why the sergeant wasn’t ripping into him.

  Gergely made a small production of lighting a cigarette. Then he said, “The sorry bastards who went east in 1942, there aren’t a hell of a lot of us left. The Russians did slaughter us, in carload lots. And the Americans’ll do the same goddamn thing to us this time around. Gives you something to look forward to, you know?”

  Gyula had nothing to say to that. What could you say? What went through Tibor’s head was That’s what we get for being a small country. The Nazis had aimed Hungary at the Soviet Union and fired it. If the Russians killed Magyars by carload lots, more of Hitler’s Germans stayed alive. Not enough more, as it turned out. Now the Communists in Moscow were firing Hungary at the United States. If the Americans killed piles of Hungarians, more Russians might survive.

  Enough more? Tibor had trouble believing it. Not that Stalin would care. Like Hitler, Stalin cared less for a life than Sergeant Gergely cared for a smoke. He burned through lives faster than Gergely burned through cigarettes, too.

  And if they really started throwing atomic bombs around, lives would go up in smoke faster than ever. How many cities had already got thrown into the incinerator? The front line might wind up the safest
place of all.

  —

  Marian Staley listened to the news with shock and disbelief that grew every day. When President Truman announced that the United States had used atomic bombs against cities in Manchuria, they were cities she’d never heard of, cities with names the newsman had trouble pronouncing the same way twice, cities—not to put too fine a point on it—full of Chinamen. As with the Japs in the last war, who could work up any real sympathy for swarms of Chinamen blasted off the face of the earth? Especially when they, or the people who told them what to do, were Reds?

  No, her main worry was that Bill was safe. She dreaded every unfamiliar car that stopped near the house. She stared from the front windows till the people who got out of the car proved not to be Air Force officers bringing her the worst news in the world.

  But the Red Chinese had friends who’d taught them how to be Communists. And Joseph Stalin couldn’t let his friends and allies get bombed that way without doing anything about it, not if he wanted them to go on taking him seriously.

  And so, four nights after American B-29s smashed the Manchurian cities, Russian Tu-4s, flying low so radar wouldn’t spot them till too late, bombed Aberdeen and Norwich, Rouen and Nancy, Bremen and Augsburg. You might not know exactly where in Britain and France and Germany those towns had lain, but you knew where Britain and France and Germany were. They weren’t in the back of beyond, the way Manchuria was.

  Then Stalin went on Radio Moscow and made what Marian thought was an uncommonly smarmy speech even by the standards of the twentieth century, which had seen more than its share of smarmy political speeches. “The United States has seen fit to use atomic bombs against a fraternal socialist state assisting in a war of national liberation, and to do so without justification or provocation,” the Soviet boss said. “This cannot go unpunished. It cannot, and it has not.”

  In the English version Marian listened to, Stalin continued, “President Truman stressed that the United States did not attack the territory of the peace-loving peasants and workers of the USSR. I take equal pains to stress that the Soviet Union has not attacked the territory of the USA. Nor will we, unless our own territory is attacked. But the United States must understand that our allies are as important to us as its allies are to it. He has struck at our allies’ provincial cities; we have done the same against as many of his allies’ towns. We have not increased his terror, but we have unflinchingly met it.”

  As soon as the speech was over, an American newscaster said, “The North Atlantic Treaty obliges America to consider an attack on its European allies to be an attack on itself. An attack of this scale, coupled with the Russian mobilization in the eastern zone of Germany and in Czechoslovakia, has caused great concern in the White House. President Truman will address the nation tomorrow to discuss the threat of our safety.”

  “The President will address the nation?” Linda asked.

  “That’s right, honey. It means he’ll talk to the country,” Marian told her daughter.

  “I know our address,” Linda said. “You taught it to me in case I ever got lost, but I never did. Can I go on the radio and tell people what it is?”

  “It’s not quite the same thing,” Marian said.

  “How come?” Linda wasn’t going to let go of it till she got an answer that made sense to her. But how were you supposed to explain war so it made sense to a four-year-old?

  For that matter, how were you supposed to explain war so it made sense to anybody? I’ll keep hurting you till you do what I say. That was what it boiled down to. If she tried to do that to the family across the street to make them quit throwing loud, drunken parties, the police would cart her off to jail. Her angry dreams of burning down their house stayed firmly in her imagination, where they belonged.

  But no policeman could stop one country from going after another. For a moment, it had looked as though the United Nations would become that kind of cop. But the only reason the UN backed America’s move against the North Koreans was that Russia was boycotting the proceedings.

  If the international organization had taken control of all the A-bombs after World War II ended, and if no country had been able to make them on its own after that…Had that happened, policemen might be able to keep unruly countries in line. But it hadn’t. The USA had the bomb. So did the Russians, now. That made them both like the Mafia in Chicago in the Twenties, only more so. They could do what they aimed to do, not what anybody else told them to do.

  And so…war.

  “When’s Daddy coming home?” Linda asked, maybe out of the blue, maybe not.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Marian answered. “When he can. When they let him. When the war’s over.” Those were all possibly true. Another possibly true response was Never. Marian refused to dwell on that one now. It was for when a branch scraping on the roof woke her at three in the morning and she couldn’t go back to sleep.

  “I wish he would,” Linda said.

  “Me, too,” her mother said. Bill had been gone for most of a year now. That felt like a long time to Marian. It had to be an eternity for Linda. She wasn’t the same person now as she had been then. She’d learned the alphabet. She could sound out words on her blocks and on pages in her books. More seemed to be going on inside her every single day.

  She changed. She grew. Bill, meanwhile, stayed what he’d been for her ever since he went back on duty: pictures on the wall and on the dresser in the big bedroom. He was still somebody she remembered and loved, but out of the ever more distant past.

  Marian bit down on the inside of her lower lip. Sometimes Bill seemed that way to her, too. Oh, she got letters from him. She wrote to him, too. How could you pour out your heart, though, when you knew a smirking censor stood between you and the one you loved?

  For that matter, how could you pour out your heart on paper any which way? Marian always felt like a fool when she tried to set down what was going on in her heart. Writing wasn’t made to do things like that, not unless you were Shakespeare or somebody. So it seemed to her, anyway. She could write about how a pot roast had turned out or how a hinge on the closet door needed fixing. She could even write about funny things Linda said. Love letters? When they were together, she could tell Bill she loved him. She did tell him so, all the time.

  On paper, though, it was different. The words looked stupid. They sounded stupid, too. Bill had to feel the same way. His letters were full of stories about baseball games between bomber crews and about who was on the latest USO tour. He’d write Miss you. Love you…and that would be that. Marian believed he did miss her and love her. She would have liked to read it in a way that made her feel it as well as see it on the page, though.

  She would have liked that, but she didn’t expect to get it. She’d married a flyer, not a writer. A cousin of hers had married a writer. He drank. He didn’t make much money. He chased other women. And he was a cold fish in person no matter what kind of pretty words he could put down on paper.

  “Do you remember the air-raid alerts Seattle and other West Coast towns went through in the early days of the Second World War?” the radio announcer asked rhetorically. “We didn’t know what Japan could do, and we didn’t want to take any chances. Well, civil-defense officials say those days are back again. We will be testing our defense tomorrow at ten A.M. Don’t be alarmed when the sirens go off. It’s not the Russians. It’s only a test. No one expects that the Russians can really get here. We just want to stay on the safe side.”

  Marian did remember those dark days after Pearl Harbor. She didn’t want to think days like those could come again. But she knew that not wanting to think it didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Air-raid alert. Ten tomorrow morning.

  —

  “Come on! Come on! Come on!” Captain Oleg Gurevich yelled over the rumble of a company’s worth of big diesel engines. “Are we ready to move? We’d fucking well better be ready to move!”

  Konstantin Morozov waved from the turret of his tank to show it could roll whenever the
captain ordered. Night was falling on the Red Army encampment near Meiningen. The tanks would move up to the border between the Russian zone in Germany and the American under cover of darkness. By the time the sun rose tomorrow, from the air it would look as if these tanks, and the rest at this enormous base, hadn’t gone anywhere.

  And, by the time the sun rose tomorrow, the tanks that had moved up to the border would be under netting and branches and dead grass that made them effectively invisible from the air. The Red Army took maskirovka seriously. What the enemy couldn’t see, he’d have a harder time wrecking.

  During the last war, the Germans had been pretty good at camouflage. But pretty good, against Russians, amounted to pretty bad. From what Morozov had seen of the way the Americans did business, they just didn’t give a damn about concealment. They thought of war as a boxing match. You got into the ring with the other guy and you slugged away till he fell over or you did.

  Of course, when you started slugging with atom bombs, you had reason to believe the other guy would be the one who fell. Morozov’s belly knotted. He didn’t want to die like that. But he didn’t see what he could do about it. He might live through another war. If he tried to desert, the MGB absolutely, positively would give him a 9mm bullet in the back of the head.

  “Let’s go!” Captain Gurevich shouted, and waved toward the west. “Urra! for the Red Army! Urra! for the Soviet Union!”

  Coughing, Sergeant Morozov ducked down into his turret and slammed the cupola hatch shut. The diesel stink was just as thick in here as it had been outside. What kind of maskirovka could you use to hide the smell and the smoke? He imagined fresh-air generators sucking up exhaust and spitting out clean, fragrant, transparent gases. Being only a tank commander, though, he couldn’t imagine how to make those generators.